Church, and to Mr. Palfrey or Mr. Lothrop, its successive beloved and revered ministers, caused her to look askance on any churchgoing in other directions. And it was at Federal Street Church that Dr. Channing preached.

The Sundays had a strenuous character unknown to our day. "All the family", says Margaret Harding, "was expected to go to the church, of which Dr. Lothrop was pastor, on Brattle Street. . . . After the morning service we went to Sunday School. We returned to the house for a lunch of gingerbread and apples, eaten in the nursery, and then went again to the afternoon service. After a walk, perhaps around the Common, we came home perfectly ravenous to the neverto-be-forgotten supper of cold tongue or corned shoulder of pork and baked potatoes. Nothing ever tasted so good! In the evening we sang psalmtunes." Aside from all this family observance, no one could really understand Lucretia Hale who did not know that her life was founded on a deeply religious basis, and that in her trials, which were many, she was supported by something stronger than her interest in life or even her cheerful temperament.

Her faith was with her to the very last hours of her long life. I sometimes wonder if the writers whose work overflows with a sort of irrepressible gaiety are not apt to be very religious

persons. "The Peterkins", my aunt's one work which has lived, is full of that lighthearted mirth. And Lewis Carroll, the great master in this kind, was a very religious man.

It is not surprising that her first published books should belong to the category of what is called "religious reading". The first of them all, "Margaret Percival in America", written in collaboration with her brother Edward, was indeed a combination of the hearty piety of both authors with a wild audacity which was equally characteristic of their best writing. But that audacity lay more in the conception than in the execution of this book. It was intended as a sequel to the novel "Margaret Percival", written by Miss Sewell, a well known High Church writer, at the time of the Oxford Movement. I may add that it was a most unexpected sequel.

Lucretia compiled, in the years which followed, several books of devotion: "The Service of Sorrow", "Seven Stormy Sundays", and a manual of reading on the Lord's Supper. In the two first, the selections are connected by a thread of narrative. She also wrote, and published in 1861, a story which she called "Struggle for Life". But of all her earlier writing, the most characteristic and successful achievement is "The Queen of the Red Chessmen", published in the young "Atlantic Monthly" of 1858. This story

seems to have been written under the influence of Hoffmann, a great favorite of her mother's, who had translated one or two of his tales. While the form may be Germanic the treatment is, however, highly individual. The extraordinary conception of the Red Queen, awakened to life as a beautiful and fascinating girl, living as the guest of a suburban doctor's wife and assisting with the family sewing, is Lucretia's alone.

My own first recollections of my Aunt Lucretia date from the late Fifties or early Sixties, when the family had removed from their large house in Hamilton Place, near Boston Common, to a little one in Brookline Village. My visits were infrequent at first, but I must always have been there on New Year's Day, which was to us then what Christmas Day became later the time for the great interchange of family presents. I can also recall a heartfelt, though scarcely solemn, celebration of the Fourth of July, all the more earnest because of the Civil War, which made a stormy background to the events of all family life in those days. My Aunt Lucretia read the Declaration of Independence aloud, from the vantage ground of the front piazza, while the others punctuated it by the explosion of firecrackers and torpedoes at the end

of each sentence. Thanksgiving Day was always the occasion for the soul stirring dramatics of which I have spoken.

As I advanced a trifle nearer to the years of discretion, I was often sent to my grandmother's from our own house at the South End, in the red or brown Brookline horsecars of the time, first alone, later with a little brother or two in hand. There we found a joyous welcome, the more to be admired since my aunts were always extremely busy. Yet their own occupations never prevented their finding out new and fascinating ones for us. Naturally, little reading or writing could be done while we were there. But, since every woman in that family was a competent and practical seamstress, my aunts used to cut out and fit their voluminous and elaborate dresses of the Sixties, guided by fashion plates of ladies who appeared to me of heavenly beauty, whose charming heads, somewhat resembling the Empress Eugénie, I was encouraged to cut out and stick into a succession of costumes from the same sources. My aunts did a good deal of the cross stitch worsted work of the day, and took pleasure in setting me to work upon a sampler, which I suppose was one of the last made in Massachusetts. These delightful hours were spent

with my Aunt Lucretia, my Aunt Susan, and my grandmother, who was a constant and cheerful giver of cents or of "fractional currency", with which to buy lozenges or sticks of candy in the village. My uncles often looked in on us; I suppose their hours were partly arranged by the working schedule of the "Daily Advertiser". How we could all have found room in that little parlor, I cannot now understand — all this dressmaking in progress, private worsted work of my own or the painting of large newspaper pictures for scrapbooks, in which I think most of the family joined, or the preparation of a toy theatre, while pretty young Brookline ladies came in and out, and a pussycat, the venerated Totty or one of his successors, filled up all interstices of space or time.

As I

It was during those Brookline years that the earlier "Peterkin" papers were written. The first of them all was invented for the younger daughter of Lucretia's old schoolmate, Mrs. Lesley, during a summer stay in the hill country of Princeton, in Massachusetts. Little Meggie was ill. Sitting by her bedside, Aunt Lucretia, as the child called her, told the story of "The Lady Who Put Salt into Her Coffee". have said, the Lady from Philadelphia, who set everything right in these tales, was Mrs. Lesley, this fortunate child's mother. The fourth of the stories was first told at Keene, at the house of Lucretia's other lifelong friend, that Margaret Harding whose reminiscences I have been quoting, now Mrs. White. As the family were starting to take a drive Keene drives were famous they had the misadventure the Peterkins experienced on a like occasion: they forgot to unhitch their horse. My aunt immediately constructed a story from this misfortune, to amuse little Eliza White, raising its possibilities to a

ment of Lucretia Hale's life; but I doubt if she ever really knew they were that. She had already given much more time and labor than they ever required at her hand to work which was significant and interesting in relation to that day, and to her own character and temperament; but not much of that work has lasted. "The Queen of the Red Chessmen" has lived out its sixty years. I bought it a year or two ago in a cheap pamphlet in a department store. But the Peterkins have gone on living a continuous and sturdy life; they are more read now than they were ten years ago. Had she not written these stories, she would never have made any contribution to literature which was her very own. The creature of fire and air, the tricksy spirit which only her intimate friends knew lurked behind her gentle and retiring manner, had never before been allowed to spread his wings; he now spread them to some purpose. She had always loved to tell children stories, and they had always loved to hear them. Now her audience was extended, and she found herself, at last, as much at ease in talking to that larger circle of children as to the little brothers and sisters in her mother's nursery, or to all the children who called her Aunt Lucretia. Another reason for the success of these tales is that the habitual condition of mind of

the excellent Peterkins has been shared with them, at times, by every human being on this earth.

The earlier of these stories were published in "Our Young Folks", the adored magazine for children which we all read in those days. She continued writing them for years in the intervals which her health or her daily occupations allowed; yet, as I have said, I do not think she realized how important they were as a part of her lifework.

When their mother died in 1866, the family left Brookline, and Lucretia's friends must have been electrified to hear that she, the delicate invalid of over forty, was going to Egypt with her sister Susan, to make their brother Charles a visit. She was dreadfully sick on the ocean voyage; the journey to Alexandria, across Europe and the Mediterranean, must have been an arduous one in those days; and the stay with her brother, the agent and consul general of the United States in Egypt, comprised a voyage up the Nile and a horseback journey in Palestine. None of these things appears to have daunted her. She got an immense amount of pleasure out of them, especially during the voyage up the Nile, when her beloved friends Professor and Mrs. Lesley were of the party.

When she came back to America she passed two years in Keene, near her equally dear friends the Whites, and threw herself most heartily into their parish interests. Her travels may have overfatigued her they probably did but they seem to have given her new force in unexpected directions. When she settled in Boston once more, it was to lead an entirely different life from that of her earlier years. Her chief interests now began to be public When the vote for school boards was given to women in Massachusetts, she not only qualified as a voter but

ones.

became one of the first women members of the Boston School Committee. I think she served for two consecutive terms. She was a useful member of the Board and an especially welcome one to the teachers, who found in her a constant and a wise friend.

This was the one public office which she filled. But she also spent much time in work for the Society for the Higher Education of Women, in founding cooking schools, and in acting as one of the teachers in Miss Ticknor's excellent correspondence school for women, which we used to call the Study-atHome Society. At different times, indeed, as in the earlier part of her life, she taught classes on various subjects, mainly historical ones. Teaching, like writing, was a family occupation which came easily to her hand.

She usually lived in little apartments, lined with books, and full of cheerfulness. Each one of them seemed to have especial advantages in her eyes. She would have liked to live in one of the earliest settlement houses in Boston; to take rooms there, as in any apartment house, and to be of what use she could, as time went on, to her neighbors. Her brother Edward opposed this plan, and lived to regret it; for a resident without responsibility, in such a house, was exactly what she was fitted to be. As it was, she was always on the most helpful and democratic terms with those people among whom she lived. Her friends were not only agreeable teachers and clever literary people, but the poor and sick and unhappy. She was destined to be the friend of the unlucky, but the lucky wanted to be her friends too. In fact, her talent for friendship almost deserved the name of genius. Her devotion to her friends was returned not only in affection, but in practical and faithful ways which gave ease to her later years.

During these years, she did a good deal of writing. In 1873, she had written a story of the Puritan days called "The Two Letters", printed in "The Atlantic Monthly". Later she wrote, in collaboration with Edwin Lasseter Bynner, a story called "The Uncloseted Skeleton". The novel which she wrote about 1877, called "The Wolf at the Door", for the "No Name Series", a set of anonymous stories published by Roberts Brothers, is often entertaining and interesting, as is much of her work at this time, written largely for the magazines and the newspapers. But her best expression seems to have been in a cross between imagination and satire a most gentle satire, but satire still. And it is only in relation to the Peterkins that it has its full outlet. As her life drew toward an end, she

encountered the great trial of blindness; and she bore it bravely, as she had borne her other trials. It was a long one, for the progress of her disease was gradual. Little by little, she had to give up the small and pleasant occupations which she loved. Cribbage and solitaire had been dear to her; but now, when a friend sent her the description of a new game of "patience", she answered that she could no longer play patience she must live it. But even so gentle a complaint was rare with her.

As her blindness became hopeless and complete, her brilliant mind clouded; but even then she found more to enjoy than to suffer. Up to the end she made new friends and loved to be with the old ones. That end came on June 12, 1900. years old.

She was nearly eighty